According to statistics provided by Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Server and Tools Business, present at the Microsoft Virtualization Launch on September 8, 2008, only 12% of all servers in production environments are virtualized, with the volume of virtualized desktops sufficiently low to be considered irrelevant. But in the future this aspect will change. Virtualization is only now moving into mainstream, and Microsoft, with products such as Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Application Virtualization 4.5 is ready to contribute to making the technology ubiquitous.

 

"Virtualization will change the way we work with information, and applications and data, the information we work with will all become virtualized. They will be available wherever we are, no matter what device we're working with. We think about the devices a lot, but it's not really about the devices, it's really all about people, and the way they work together. So imagine this world where virtualization becomes ubiquitous," Muglia stated.

 

At the Microsoft Virtualization Launch, the Redmond giant announced that the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 would be offered as a free download come August 8. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is designed as a hypervisor-based server virtualization solution compatible with both Linux and Windows. Also on August 8, the company will release System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, a management product set up to handle Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. Microsoft has already released to manufacturing Application Virtualization 4.5.

 

"Our goal is to make virtualization ubiquitous, with that in mind, we have Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. Hyper-V Server 2008 is our standalone bare metal hypervisor solution. So let's go ahead, and we're going to remote into one of these boxes. I'll go ahead and login. And once we've logged in, you can see there's no additional resources left to anything that's not virtualization. There's really no GUI, just a simple command line interface in order to configure the server. Once the server has been configured, you remotely manage it through the Hyper-V Manager in Windows Server 2008 and Vista, or use Virtual Machine Manager 2008," Muglia added.